Has Facebook made photos better?

Yesterday’s announcement and post by Facebook product manager Sam Odio entitled “Making Facebook Photos Better” has inspired me to ask the question.  ”Do you think that’s true?”

The default reaction might be to think this is “facial recognition” software.  According to Annika Heinle of Facebook Corporate Communications, “this is not facial recognition software in the sense that it recognizes specific people. Instead it is a facial detection feature that finds faces in photos.”  There in lies the difference, a big one. The intent of the software is to make it easier to tag photos – which I think is a good thing.

This all stems from the recent corporate acquisition of Divvyshot, the creators of this software.  A smart investment since there are over 100 million photos uploaded a day according to Odio.

Still, one might ask since Facebook continues to struggle with a large segment of users who are revolting against their privacy policies, will this go any further?  Some might see this as yet another step in the wrong direction, albeit a small one in this case. Certainly Facebook’s track record with respect to privacy is abysmal, bad move after bad move so there it is reasonable to question the social networking giants’ intentions.

What do you think?  Conspiracy, smart acquisition, don’t care either way?  Leave your thoughts here and we’ll use them on the radio show…

UPDATE: Canadian lawyer launches class-action suit against Facebook as covered by CTV, and Canadian Press.

Do you think this lawsuit has a chance?  Would you participate?